Virginia Wing are releasing their superb third LP Ecstatic Arrow on June 8, and have shared the video for lead single ‘The Second Shift’ exclusively with tQ.
The clip, which you can watch below, was directed by Oscar Foster-Kane, and stars the band’s singer Alice Merida Richards.
The video "seeks to represent the roles of both the surveyor and the surveyed that exist within female identities; An observance of others versus a continual self-scrutiny on behalf of the observer. It’s not possible to dance like nobody’s watching, because someone always is."
Accompanying the new record, Richards has written about how her experiences as a woman in the music industry have influenced the album.
She said: "In this past year, I have felt the weight of my gender so acutely that it has become inescapable. I have become aware of it in every moment. I feel it in rooms where I find I can’t express my ideas or desires in the way others can. I feel diminished in smaller and larger ways. I feel confined in my body, constantly observing myself, judging pre-emptively the judgement of others. I feel exhausted by the way my experiences are mirrored over and over in the experiences of other women.
"As a musician, these experience are compounded by the subtle but pervasive misogynist attitudes prevalent within the culture. Women are so often viewed as a mirror reflecting men’s creative desires, as opposed to autonomous beings with an inner world just as vast and as rich.
"I wanted to write an album as a means of escape. I didn’t want to express only these feelings of frustration and exhaustion because to write only about the pain is to live inside that pain. Instead, I am attempting optimism; to write about support and friendship and endurance but mostly to imagine being released from this weight – of wiping the slate clean of learned behaviours and inherited oppression and to indulge in a moment of respite"
Virginia Wing have also announced a number of new live dates. They are as follows:
AUGUST
24-25, Sea Change Festival, Totnes
OCTOBER
11, Oslo, London
12, Nice n Sleazy, Glasgow
13, Now Wave, Manchester
